Gift of the Magi
December 25, 2002
by David E. Reiser, MD.
 "Little Girl With Matches" by Katarina Reiser |
Christmas Eve, 2002
6:05 PM
Now—if the green arrow on the traffic light will just stay
green for another second. Why is that car in front of me just sitting
there? Yep! I knew this would happen! Goddamnit! The arrow is turning
yellow. So, go already! But no such luck. Not tonight.
Damnit! I beep my horn, just a tap really, that’s all. But I
cringe at what I now behold. As the car creeps out into the intersection,
I catch a glimpse of the driver. She’s an ancient white-haired woman,
pressing her face to the windshield and struggling to see ahead. I slump
into my seat.
The signal changes and the oncoming traffic lunges ahead, headlights blurring in the rain…I'm going to be stuck here for another five minutes now… I think I'm getting a headache... Maybe a migraine... It's Christmas again! It's the same damned thing every year...
How long has it been since I felt even a trace of Christmas's magic? Rochester, I think. Rochester, New York, in maybe 1983... Almost twenty years ago. Then, the memories return, like bats pouring from the mouth of a cave. I try to fight them off, but tonight I can’t. I see my son, not as he is now, but the way he looked then, when he was four. Exactly the way he looked…The persistence of memory…In truth, I have no idea what he might look like now. I haven’t seen him in two-and-a-half-years.
In memory, all of the grown-ups are beaming. He opens his presents. The grown-ups go, “Oooh!” and “Aahh!” I’ve started a big fire. The coffee is strong and fresh. The Robert Shaw Chorale is singing "Silent Night." My son’s mother comes over and plunks herself down on the carpet next to me. She rests her hand on my knee and whispers, "Good job with the fire, Dad."
“Dad...”
In memory I can still faintly feel her hand…
Anyhow—that was all a long, long time ago.
A cold front is moving in from the Pacific and the rain is growing heavier. The wind is starting to gust. The stores are still open, but the weather has driven everyone indoors. The sidewalk is almost deserted now. Overhead, plywood Santa's bob from steel cables strung rooftop to rooftop. “Merry Christmas!” they say.
“Ho! Ho! Ho!”
Ho! Ho! Ho!
When a burst of wind explodes, they lurch and pitch and kick their red Masonite boots into the air, dancing the Balalaika.
Two blasts of wind pound my car like fists.
That’s what memory is. A pair of fists.
The arrow is green.
I floor it.
8:30 PM
We’re alone, my wife and I, just the two of us. We’re lying on our stomachs after dinner on a couple of oversized pillows, watching the fire. We are silent. The fire sizzles and pops. It’s shadows cast flickers on my wife’s face, and she is so beautiful that sometimes I fear I might start to weep. Why me? I wonder. Why was I spared, when so many others just go under forever? God only knows...
Amazing Grace… Amazing Grace…That blesses a poor wretch like me…
God only knows.
Her name is Katarina. We’ve been inseparable for over a year. I’m not healed, of course. I will never be healed. No one this deeply scarred ever fully recovers. But I do have hope now. For too many of us, I fear, Christmas is a time when there seems to be no hope at all. I’m actually very worried—for me, for you, for all of us. Now, we’re seeing the outbreak of suicides. In ten or twenty years we’ll start clutching at our throats and slumping over into our plates, dead from heart attacks. And a logarithm beyond these—the actuarial’s casualty figures—loom still more foreboding portents. Even when we live bodily, how many of us trudge through the rest of our lives as spiritual voids, as the walking dead? How many of us ever regain any hope at all?
The Greek demigod, Janus, is commonly called the “Guardian of Doorways.” He’s the one you’ve seen in photographs, chiseled out of stone in bass relief, with two long gray beards and two faces. One looks back, one ahead. Over the centuries, Janus has become a symbol for the schism between memory and anticipation, between the past and the future. But he did not start out that way. In the beginning, he was a talisman, there for protection and good luck. Often, his profile could be seen at all four corners of a house. He had, so to speak, eyes in the back of his head.
But even myths grow and change with time. Those of us struck down by Parental Alienations Syndrome, on the other hand, may not ever grow again. We are frozen, unable to find anything ahead worth going on to, yet without a single place in the past to return to. For a long time I was Janus. I looked normal, I imagine, on the outside. But on the inside I knew things were different. When crowds teemed out into the city streets at noon, I would catch a glimpse of myself. I’d see it in every pane of glass. Where others saw an expressionless man out walking alone, I saw the hideous truth. I was naked, and I wasn’t so much walking as I was staggering. I strained forward, bowed under an enormous weight. I was chained to a doorframe, frozen in time. But for some reason, only I heard the scraping sound.
Sure, I moved…In space. But not in time.
Now, I move once again in both dimensions, only a toddler really. And there is no mystery here. A deep and vital woman has taken me to her. She loves me. But if it was her grace to take me in when no one else would, then my courage lay in my willingness to endure the pain of thawing out after being frozen alive. It can be excruciating, being alive again and feeling the pain that I had so long been numb to. This is a different experience from the earlier days of my enslavement to a doorframe. Now, like Janus, I know the correct time zone. I also know that to keep my forward momentum, I mustn’t linger in the past, but I also must not try to flee from it. I must face it. And feel it. There is no easier softer way.
By a woman, I have been delivered…
I start to talk about how incredibly fortunate I feel. Kat-girl (as I call her) puts a finger to her lips. “Shhhh,” she says. I can hear the radio now, playing softly in the kitchen.
“Oh come let us adore you…Oh come let us adore you…”
“I love—”
“Shhhh, listen!”
“Oh come let us adore you…Oh come let us adore you…”
The tenor’s voice is pure and strong. He sings a capella. And yeah, I do. I start to cry…
The Gift of the Magi. It’s funny how life unfolds. A woman whom I had trusted completely not long ago had methodically attempted to destroy me. The planning, I suspect, took years. And she would have succeeded, too, if Kat-girl here had not descended from heaven when she did, showering her golden light everywhere. Only a woman could ever have betrayed me so savagely (Call me Janus—but, with a man, I would have seen something this treacherous heading my way). And yet, only a woman could have saved me.
“Oh, come let us adore thee.
Oh, come let us adore thee.
Oh, come let us adore thee in Bethlehem.”
I am not Christian in faith, and probably not as freighted down by its ambivalent symbolism, its exultation of suffering. I’m sure I would have been if I’d been exposed to it as a child. Symbols travel like laser-guided smart missiles at that age, right into the unconscious. There, they take up residence. And endure. I find it easier, by comparison, to admire the stunning clarity, power, and beauty in Christianity’s symbols.
The Gift of the Magi… I think of Katarina again, who took me to her heart when I was completely bereft, when my life was in shambles. I wasn’t just full of the “excess baggage” that people warn you not to expose on Adult Friend Finders. You know—the one that results in an automatic disqualification? I was a damned Pullman car crammed to the roof with baggage. I was buckling under the load of it all.
Joseph and Mary rode into Bethlehem on a donkey. Even though she was at term, no one in the town would offer them a hand.
Three wise men appeared. They knelt and offered their gifts to an infant who had just been born, outdoors, in a manger, behind a barn. I think I can imagine that night. I see everyone’s breaths condense, and then vanish into the night, like ghosts. I hear the stamp of hoofs and the snorts of livestock coming from the barn. The straw is coarse. Its stems are sharp. They pinch and snag on the baby’s flesh. There is a fetid odor in the air. And yet I sense that something powerful happening here. The son of God has appeared. His cry mingles in eerie harmony with the braying and honking of other animals.
According to the Bible, all animals were at peace that night for the first. and the probably last, time. Ever. The lion lay down with the lamb.
“Oh, come let us adore thee.
“Oh, come let us adore thee.”
“The meek shall inherit the earth.”
“Forgive thy enemy”.
Forgive… Forgive… Forgive…
I don’t know about you, but for me the greed and sadism of humanity has set me permanently on edge. I trust no one. I must be vigilant. I dare not forgive. So, I’m not certain that I buy into this turning-the-other-cheek business. I want to forgive—Sure, who doesn’t?—but, like Janus, I’m very suspicious. I try to cover my back at all times. And when I do look behind me, most of what I discern is evil. I ask myself how I could ever have been so naïve? Meanwhile, my other face squints into the night ahead and searches in vain for the North Star…The gloom is as impenetrable as squids’ ink…
Katarina returns from the kitchen. She bends down and hands me a cup of coffee.
The Magi knelt…
I know that there is only one act of folly more unforgivable in my own mind than letting my guard down ever again—and that would be keeping it up.
Soon, it will be January, Janus’s month. A new year. A time for making renewed vows about the future, but also a time of painful retrospection.
I wonder what the coming year will hold—for me, for you, for all of
us on this tiny bashed-in planet, so adrift in an empty universe, so
flooded everywhere with hate.
David E. Reiser is a writer and physician. His books and articles in the 1980s addressed medicine's urgent need to make education and patient care more humane. Along with others, he quietly changed the way students are taught throughout the world. The New York Times described his book, Medicine as a Human Experience, as a textbook that revived "a long-lost skill" in physicians--"compassion."
In 2000, David lost his only son to Parental Alienation Syndrome. "Before my divorce in 2000," he says, "I had never been charged with anything worse than a speeding ticket...They threw me in jail and dragged me into a courtroom handcuffed, weeping, and manacled to a chain. The proceeding required less than ten minutes. I never saw my son again... I'm no 'expert.' I'm just one more broken man. I hope to do something positive with what is left of me. My resume is one line long--I am a father who lost the most beloved person in his life--my son. I do what I can now, not because I'm noble, but because I have no choice. I try to do the right thing because I sense that this is my only hope. My ideals are all that, in the end, they couldn't take from me. I refuse to accept a world where hatred routinely prevails over love, and where the destruction of our children is viewed as simply the cost of doing business. I'm no saint. I'm dazed and terrified. I'm not sure what "God" even means, and I'm sure as hell no hero. But I will stand up to any legal system, hateful mob, or totalitarian regime whose code of ethics is built around cruelty, power, and lying; and whose only god is money."
